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Everyone's favorite Dirty Old Man returns with a new volume of uncollected work. Charles Bukowski (1920-1994), one of the most outrageous figures of 20th-century American literature, was so prolific that many significant pieces never found their way into his books. Absence of the Hero contains much of his earliest fiction, unseen in decades, as well as a number of previously unpublished stories and essays. The classic Bukowskian obsessions are here: sex, booze, and gambling, along with trenchant analysis of what he calls Playing and Being the Poet. Among the book's highlights are tales of his infamous public readings (The Big Dope Reading, I Just Write Poetry So I Can Go to Bed with Girls); a review of his own first book; hilarious installments of his newspaper column, Notes of a Dirty Old Man, including meditations on neo-Nazis and driving in Los Angeles; and an uncharacteristic tale of getting lost in the Utah woods (Bukowski Takes a Trip). Yet the book also showcases the other Bukowski -- an astute if offbeat literary critic. From his own Manifesto to his account of poetry in Los Angeles (A Foreword to These Poets) to idiosyncratic evaluations of Allen Ginsberg, Robert Creeley, LeRoi Jones, and Louis Zukofsky, Absence of the Hero reveals the intellectual hidden beneath the gruff exterior. The second volume of his uncollected prose, Absence of the Hero is a major addition to the Bukowski canon, essential for fans yet suitable for new readers as an introduction to the wide range of his work.
Price:
16.95 USD

Virtually everything Black Sparrow publishes is worthwhile, but without Bukowski, whose 40-odd books kept Black Sparrow's bread buttered right up until his death in 1994, none of the rest of it would be possible. Fortunately, Buk left plenty of unpublished manuscript behind that, judging from this culling from it, is of a piece with the published stuff. That is, it consists of quasi-autobiographical poems and stories. The poems' lines are only one to six words long, and the stories' sentences aren't much longer. Poems and stories relay the adventures and attitudes, at all stages of his life, of loafer and lumpen intellectual Henry Chinaski. They are occasionally laugh-out-loud funny, occasionally laughable because Henry and his women and pals are such a bunch of slobs, and occasionally as boring as Henry and company claim their lives are. And, to tell the truth, they are effortlessly, magnetically readable, especially if you are susceptible to their bargain-basement existentialist charm. Plenty are.
Price:
17.00 USD

Charles Bukowski is one of America's best-known contemporary writers of Beats, Bukowski & Poetry and prose, and, many would claim, its most influential and imitated poet. He was born in Andernach, Germany, and raised in Los Angeles, where he lived for fifty years. He published his first story in 1944, when he was twenty-four, and began writing Beats, Bukowski & Poetry at the age of thirty-five. He died in San Pedro, California, on March 9, 1994, at the age of seventy-three, shortly after completing his last novel, Pulp (1994).
Price:
16.00 USD

In 1971, the outlandish originator of gonzo journalism, Hunter S. Thompson (1937-2005) commandeered the international literary limelight with his best-selling, comic masterpiece Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Thompson displayed an uncanny flair for inserting himself into the epicenter of major sociopolitical events of our generation. and his audacious, satirical, ranting screeds on American culture have been widely read and admired. Whether in books, essays, or collections of his correspondence, his raging and incisive voice and writing style are unmistakable. Conversations with Hunter S. Thompson is the first compilation of selected personal interviews that traces the trajectory of his prolific and much- publicized career. These engaging exchanges reveal Thompson's determination, self-indulgence, energy, outrageous wit, ire, and passions as he discusses his life and work. The book features pieces from Playboy, Spin, Hustler, American Journalism Review, and talks with such notables as Douglas Brinkley and Curtis Wilkie; and includes interviews ranging from 1974 to 2003, spanning most of his career.
Price:
22.00 USD

Brash, confrontational verse and prose have made Alexie the most famous, and the most controversial, Native American writer of his generation. Alexie (First Indian on the Moon), in this first book of poems since 2000, sometimes works in sonnets, rhymed couplets, short quatrains, even villanelles. The results are mixed and occasionally na´ve (When I tell my wife about my adolescent rage/ She shrugs, rolls her eyes, and turns the page). More successful are his many experiments with footnotes and interpolated blocks of prose within poems, devices that let Alexie explore his self-consciousness, as he looks back on his childhood on the rez in Washington State, inward to his sex life and his happy marriage, and outward to public events, from the Clinton impeachment to Gonzaga University basketball. Alexie's self-interruptions also permit flights of comedy, with homages to Richard Pryor and to the porn star Ron Jeremy. The humor, in turn, lets Alexie brace himself for his most serious subjects: his love for his son, the history of his people and the last illness and death of his father, a flawed but durable example of the manliness for which Alexie so often strives.
Price:
18.00 USD

One of Charles Bukowski's best, this beer-soaked, deliciously degenerate novel follows the wanderings of aspiring writer Henry Chinaski across World War II-era America. Deferred from military service, Chinaski travels from city to city, moving listlessly from one odd job to another, always needing money but never badly enough to keep a job. His day-to-day existence spirals into an endless litany of pathetic whores, sordid rooms, dreary embraces, and drunken brawls, as he makes his bitter, brilliant way from one drink to the next. Charles Bukowski's posthumous legend continues to grow. Factotum is a masterfully vivid evocation of slow-paced, low-life urbanity and alcoholism, and an excellent introduction to the fictional world of Charles Bukowski.
Price:
13.95 USD

One of Charles Bukowski's best, this beer-soaked, deliciously degenerate novel follows the wanderings of aspiring writer Henry Chinaski across World War II-era America. Deferred from military service, Chinaski travels from city to city, moving listlessly from one odd job to another, always needing money but never badly enough to keep a job. His day-to-day existence spirals into an endless litany of pathetic whores, sordid rooms, dreary embraces, and drunken brawls, as he makes his bitter, brilliant way from one drink to the next. Charles Bukowski's posthumous legend continues to grow. Factotum is a masterfully vivid evocation of slow-paced, low-life urbanity and alcoholism, and an excellent introduction to the fictional world of Charles Bukowski.
Price:
16.99 USD

Having revived the radio variety program with A Prairie Home Companion Garrison Keillor turned to broadcasting poetry in the daily short feature The Writer's Almanac. In any given week, probably more people hear him read poems than attend poetry readings and slams. That's good because his taste is excellent. But then, his criteria are golden. For him, a poem is good if it's memorable, recitable, and accessible. The almost-unheard-of-for-poetry sales of Good Poems (2002) suggest that many endorse his taste and criteria, and the sequel to that success gives them no reason to change their minds. As before, the range of poets represented is broad contemporarily (the majority are alive or very recently deceased) and historically (sixteenth to twenty-first century), though not internationally, for, with one exception (Psalm 51), English is these poems' language of origin. As before, too, these are predominantly poems of domesticity and ordinary things, and when a poem touches the genuinely extraordinary, it is related to everyday life; for instance, Stephen Dobyns' Thelonious Monk relates a particular instance of a kind of experience virtually everyone has--the discovery of greatness. Even those tired of Lake Wobegon, or who think Keillor's a bigoted Democrat (especially after Homemade Democrat, 2004), should grant that he knows good poetry.
Price:
16.00 USD

In what is widely hailed as the best of his many novels, Charles Bukowski details the long, lonely years of his own hardscrabble youth in the raw voice of alter ego Henry Chinaski. From a harrowingly cheerless childhood in Germany through acne-riddled high school years and his adolescent discoveries of alcohol, women, and the Los Angeles Public Library's collection of D. H. Lawrence, Ham on Rye offers a crude, brutal, and savagely funny portrait of an outcast's coming-of-age during the desperate days of the Great Depression. Ham On Rye explores the brutal, brooding and sexual life of low-income, post-depression teenage existence. An autobiography rooted in Bukowski's childhood, this book is one filled with a sense of sadness and wasted potential.
Price:
16.00 USD

Gonzo journalist and literary roustabout Hunter S. Thompson flies with the angels--Hell's Angels, that is. He's lived with them, he knows them and their machines, he speaks their langauge, and he reports it back to the world with all the fearsome force of a souped-up cyclone burning rubber.
Price:
15.00 USD

2 disc rollicking live lecture from Boulder, Colorado in 1977, this cd set features Thompson at his peak and is quite informative and entertaining. A must have for the Gonzo nut, with a priceless Q & A from the students. The back of the liner notes is hard to make out, but the whole track list is available online. I'll try to improve upon it in future versions.
Price:
20.00 USD

Marking the fiftieth anniversary of Howl, Illuminated Poems celebrates the collaboration of two visionaries of different generations: Allen Ginsberg, the quintessential Beat and America's best-known poet, and Eric Drooker, the New Yorker cover artist whose provocative, apocalyptic images add a new dimension and urgency to Ginsberg's poems. Illuminated Poems contains two works only available in this volume, an introduction by Ginsberg, and thirty-four poems from 1948 through the present day, including the poem Howl in its entirety. Perhaps the single poem that captures the anguish and aspirations of the Beat Generation, Howl was originally published fifty years ago and is one of the most widely read poems of the twentieth century.
Price:
19.95 USD